Associations between men's reputations for fathering and their reproductive success among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin

Abstract

It is generally recognized that paternal care is a facultative feature of human cooperative caregiving that helps underpin our evolved life history strategy. Yet, little direct evidence links variation in men's fathering to fitness outcomes. Research in small-scale, subsistence-level societies has focused more on links between fitness and men's social status, which overlaps with paternal care (e.g., hunting prowess/reputation and provisioning) but is distinct. Helping address this gap, we demonstrate linkages between fathers' roles and fitness-related outcomes among the BaYaka, a highly egalitarian Congo Basin forager population. Using measures drawn from community perceptions of men's quality in locally-valued domains of fathering, we find that BaYaka men (N = 31) ranked as better at providing for their families and sharing resources with the community had more living children. We observed a similar pattern for men ranked as better teachers, though evidence from Bayesian regression models was weaker than for these other domains. Those men ranked higher for provisioning and sharing, respectively, also had more total children (living and deceased combined). These fathering qualities were not significantly associated with variation in child mortality. Our results are consistent with long-standing arguments around the evolutionary importance of provisioning as paternal care, and point to other pathways, such as resource sharing, through which higher quality paternal care can be linked to reproductive success.